Your IW worlds

[somecallmetim]

I thought it would be cool to have a thread where people talk about the worlds they've made up for the IW settings. So, bring them on, whether they're myth parallels, or Weird parallels or just plain old alternate histories.

Just to get things started, my campaign included an alternate history where the Confederacy managed to heap enough high profile defeats on the Union that the public completely stopped supporting the war and the 1884 election went to McClellan. The south continued as an increasingly brutal, reactionary and totalitarian regime until the 1920s when a communist revolution topples the confederacy. Rather than see a communist state appear on its border, the Union invades the southern states, which it quickly conquers, but leaves itself in a nightmare version of reconstruction with (mostly Black) communist and KKK terrorists. The rest of world history has gone on pretty much on course with a more isolationist US, though the famines in Russia were much worse without the Hoover administrations intervention, Britain and France have defeated Germany, though without Wilson no League of Nations emerged.

[Pragmatic]

That sounds similar to Turtledove (?) Southern Victory trilogies, where Lincoln loses in 1864, and ends up forming a partnership between the remnant Republicans (the most conservative ended up joining the Democrats, making it effectively a one-party system for decades) and the Socialists.

The Republicans try in 1880-ish to get back into power, but end up in a war with the Confederacy over the purchase of the northernmost Mexican territories (to build a railroad to the Pacific). The Union loses, again, and the last Republicans join with the Socialists. Which leads to the Confederates "freeing" their slaves (creating serfs, instead), to complete their alliance with Britain and France, and the Union joining with a very bureaucratic Imperial Germany.

And so on. The trilogies end with Imperial Germany and a bureaucratic US defeating Canada (splitting off an independent Quebec), the Confederacy (which had gone fascist and set up extermination camps for blacks), Britain, and France. I never got past the interval between wars, so I think the Japanese end up fighting in the WW2, also, but I don't know which side. I think Imperial Russia is still around, or maybe they joined their British/French/Confederate allies...

[Pragmatic]

My favorite ideas for IW are generally from novels I've read. The Peshawar Lancers (asteroid turns the northern hemisphere into a wasteland inhabited by cannibals; Britain relocated its top 10% to India, Australia, and South Africa; France and Germany went to North Africa; Russia went to its Central Asia provinces, and set up a doomsday cannibalistic cult; Japan invades China and is the second-strongest power). Choice of Destinies (Alexander, after defeating Persia, turned west, turning Rome into a reluctant ally, and taking out Carthage, forming a union of Roman, Greek/Macedonian, and Persian--leaving India and China to continue to rise). Hammer and Cross (a Norse king decides that Christianity wasn't for the Vikings, so forms a "People of the Book" version of Norse mythology to compete against Christianity; it's a fight between the Christians, the pagan and bloodthirsty Vikings, and the semi-civilized Asgarth men, who value knowledge much more than their medieval competitors).

Pretty much all three have a little bit of magic/fantasy about them. There's also the Years of Salt and Rice (the plague wipes of 95% of Europe instead of only 30%; a group of people reincarnate through life after life, in Muslim, Chinese, or Indian worlds).

[quarkstomper]

When I ran an IW campaign some years back, most of the timelines we visited were based on existing books or other sources. I did run one plot in a timeline where shortly after the Stock Market Crash of 1929, President Herbert Hoover was assassinated, reportedly by a communist agitator. In the resulting anti-red hysteria, America has become a virtual police state with F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover controlling things behind the scenes.

One of the leading figures of the opposition has been former New York governor Franklin Roosevelt, whose clandestine "Fireside Chats" on the radio have been an inspiration to the resistance. But Roosevelt has been arrested.

The plot started with the party being sent on a mission to break Roosevelt out of Leavenworth Prison. And it went pretty well until Doc Savage showed up to stop them...

[oldgringo2001]

I created a line called "Idawarado" based on some previous work of mine soon after Time Travel came out. I thought it was lost, but an English roleplayer saved the pages and put them into a document stored on Rapidshare.

The world is in its 1950s now. Geography and history are divergent in its United States, where the Mormons have had an independent Desert since 1860, there are five Texan states, and the Great Plains north of Oklahoma and part of the Rockies are one big state called "Idawawarado."

Here's a few paragraphs of recovered text:

The classic era of the American Teenager was in the Fifties -- not 1950 through 1959, but 1954 through 1964. Remember, American Graffiti was set in 1962. The real Korean War (not the never-never war of MASH) went on into 1953, and it killed more young men per year than Vietnam. In 1965, LBJ started sending teenage draftees to Vietnam.

The starting point for the Center City campaign is July 1955, which is "now" from this point on.

Center City and Idawarado

Center City is an idealized small city of the fifties; it's a bit bigger than Smalltown or Riverdale (more than one high school). It’s in the center of Idawarado, a state that grows corn, wheat, potatoes, cattle, "good" girls, and frustrated boys. It attracts tourists in the summer, hunters in the fall, skiers in the winter, and flying saucers year 'round. Huge areas belong to the Army and the Air Force, with no civilians allowed in. Just about every teenager who gets drafted or enlists in Idawarado winds up back in the state on one of the bases, spending their hitches guarding the perimeters. Aliens and top-secret types find Idawarado ideal; people in Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York can't even keep it straight from Idaho or Iowa or Colorado, so stories from it are always buried on the back pages.

I got the link to the recovered files at the GURPS Wikia.

[LoneWolf23k]

Here's a quick idea I had for an IW world: Patton. Where the titular character, General George S. Patton, didn't die from a road accident from that car accident in 1945.

Essentially, Harry S. Truman, after instituting the Truman Doctrine, gets Patton out of retirement and brings him in as his chief military advisor, Patton's views of the Soviets matching his own. Don't have much to go off this notion, though.

Another idea I had was for a Roman Empire that expanded Eastward toward China, rather then Westward toward Britain. Mostly because I'm curious about Roman Legions meeting Imperial Chinese Armies.